Emulator, Part Four

My suggestion to the creator was to expand the charter somewhat by adding the designation “dagger-ma’am,” but I don’t know if it penetrated the scalp. I like it, though! I guess I would. It’s the sort of thing I would like.

I’m at the point now where I am trying to figure out a chicken slash egg scenario: specifically, which has primacy. Are the kids that we have making games because

1. They see us making and playing them? 2. They play games where modifying them is the game? 3. It’s fun, and… they want to?

If they live in a place and a time where any of the above things are real, and describe actual events, any specific impetus would be inextricable. These things are simply airborne in the culture. And children have always, always made games. But the games they’re cooking now are more sophisticated, systemically, in that they have systems, as opposed to the awesome wholly emergent sort of thing they usually get up to. They’re starting from our fucking apex. They’re starting there.

It’s like when a young person decides that they want to draw their own hero, and it’s basically Spider-Man, but it’s not Spider-Man Spider-Man, or even famed New Yorker literary critic James Francis Spiderman. It’s “The Spider,” their wholly owned IP. Or Arachnidd, or whatever. Except today’s kids are up to their asses in games, not comics; they’re an aerosol. Ambient. So they make games that “look” like other games and learn how. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what this generation’s Punk will look like.